Meet the Winners of the 2024 Food Heroes Awards

The nonprofit Tucson City of Gastronomy (TCOG) has announced the 2024 winners of their Food Heroes Awards!

Yadi Wang (first place) and Dena Cowan (second place) were given the ¡Si Charro! Food Visionary Awards, and Phyllis Valenzuela (first place) and Sewa Yuli Portela Farias (second place) received Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Awards.

“For the second year, we collaborated with ¡Si Charro!, the Southwest Folklife Alliance, and the University of Arizona Southwest Center to spotlight and honor remarkable people preserving our region’s culinary heritage and building a sustainable food future,” said Jonathan Mabry, TCOG Executive Director.

The Food Visionary Awards are a partnership between TCOG and ¡Si Charro! to recognize Southern Arizonans who help us reimagine relationships with food and demonstrate creative paths to a positive food future.

The 2024 awards specifically focus on Southern Arizona farmers and gardeners who use sustainable growing methods, apply traditional knowledge, sustain heritage crops, involve young people, and share expertise with the community.

The award is funded by Carlotta Flores of ¡Si Charro! foods.

The Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Awards recognize Southern Arizona home cooks and food artisans helping to keep our food traditions alive through the continued use of heritage ingredients and techniques unique to this region. 

These awards are in honor of anthropologist and folklorist Jim Griffith (1935-2021) and his longtime support for home cooks who are preserving and teaching the food heritage and culinary traditions of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands. First-place winners each receive a cash award of $1,500 and TCOG will spotlight both first and second-place winners via its website, social media, and one or more events.

The award ceremony will take place at the Celebration of all Things S-cuk Son / Tucson at the Presidio San Agustin del Tucson Museum, 196 N. Court Avenue on Saturday, August 17 at 6:15 p.m.

Yadi Wang

First Place – Food Visionary Award

Wang is the President of DRY Co-Op and the Farm Manager at Oatman Farms. Dry Co-Op is an association of agricultural producers and service providers that builds equitable, transparent, and sustainable place-based food supply chains. It also provides ecosystem services and networking benefits for its members and communities to support human and planetary health. Oatman Farms is the first designated “Regenerative Organic Certified” farm in the Southwest. 

In Arizona’s hottest and driest location, Wang grows heirloom Sonoran White wheat and other heritage grains using no chemicals or fertilizers. His farming incorporates ecosystem approaches, including multispecies cover crops, rotational sheep grazing, integrated pest management, and agroforestry. He has seen over 150 species return to the land in the last three years; soil water retention has increased seven-fold; dew forms in the fields in July when the temperature is nearly 90 degrees at 5 a.m.; and 350 million gallons of water are conserved annually under his farming methods compared to industrially grown alfalfa in the same region.

Dena Cowan

Second Place – Food Visionary Award

Cowan is the Curator of Collections at Mission Garden. Her work at Mission Garden has saved and promoted heritage trees and crops for current and future generations. She has even grown a healthy seed stock and productive crop from one single saved seed of an endangered bean variety. She applies traditional knowledge for seed saving, soil protection, compost teas, organic composting, using traditional tools, and traditional food preservation.

Cowan strives to learn and use only the most careful, regenerative methods in her cultivation and teaches others about these techniques.  

Phyllis Valenzuela

First Place – Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Award

As a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation and Catering Chef at San Xavier Co-op, Valenzuela focuses her cooking on using traditional wild and cultivated foods available to the Tohono O’odham community for their health benefits. Her kitchen expands the range of foods prepared and consumed in tribal gatherings beyond fry bread. She sees every dish as an educational moment capable of bridging ancestral knowledge with contemporary taste preferences.

Valenzuela has dedicated her life’s work to two distinct audiences: members of her community first and foremost, and also the non-Native public in Southern Arizona. Community members highly praise her role in designing menus for festivals like Tucson Meet Yourself, events at historic Canoa Ranch, and special classes at Mission Garden. Valenzuela is the perfect example of the kind of “foodways keeper” that the late Dr. Griffith would have uplifted and documented: a remarkable food expert who labors with love without attracting too much attention, but whose knowledge and wisdom enriches all of our lives.

Sewa Yuli Portela Farias

Second Place – Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Award

Sewa’s cooking is rooted in ancestral teachings inherited from previous generations. Sewa’s family comes from the Sonoran Desert and has passed down traditional knowledge of food gathering, preparation, and sharing as sacred elements of life. Sewa has worked as a chef for a youth program under the Southern AZ Aids Foundation and launched their program providing healthy food bundles for postpartum families along with seasonal food bundles. Through this initiative, community members can receive the instruction and nourishment of Sewa’s traditional Sonoran Desert foods.

More about the Tucson City of Gastronomy (TCOG)

TCOG was formed in 2016 to manage the 2015 UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy designation for metro Tucson and Southern Arizona. 

“It works with stakeholders in the local food system and food economy to leverage the designation to increase appreciation of our food heritage, culinary assets, and food system innovations, promote them on a global scale,” said Mabry. “And link them to heritage foodways preservation, culinary tourism, and economic development.”

Learn more about the Tucson City of Gastronomy at tucson.cityofgastronomy.org.